State of the art video codecs, such as the joint video specification from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) ISO/IEC 14496-10 AVC and the International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) H.264 (commonly referred to as H.264/AVC), Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) VC-1, Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) MPEG-4 Visual and ITU-T H.263, have reached high levels of sophistication. The codecs are complicated and have many control parameters for encoding. For example, in the H.264/AVC reference software Joint Model (JM) version 10.2, approximately 180 control parameters exist for encoding. A commercial implementation of an H.264/AVC encoder commonly has even more parameters to achieve fine control.
The encoding parameters are conventionally configured intuitively or empirically based on limited experiments. For example, in order to alleviate video quality fluctuations from frame to frame, a threshold for quantization parameter differences between consecutive frames is set to a small value. Setting parameter values through intuitive or empirical experiments, though simple, cannot guarantee optimal video encoding quality. In addition, the parameters are usually configured independently. As such, although the parameters are optimal individually, the overall setting of multiple parameters may not be optimal. It would be desirable to implement a systematic framework for configuring the parameters.